Tracking HERA's
Global Health Engagement
What’s HERA?
The EU's Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA)
The EU’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) was created in follow-up to the COVID-19 pandemic. HERA was established to enhance Europe's capacity to secure medical countermeasures during pandemics or major health emergencies. This involves identifying potential threats, evaluating available countermeasures, maintaining stockpiles, supporting the development of new solutions, and ensuring the ability to produce them rapidly and at scale when necessary.
HERA is meant to function in a dual-mode capacity – in preparing for potential health threats and in responding to health threats in the emergency of an event.
How HERA fits into the global health space?
Global health is a key focus for HERA.
The establishment of HERA has presented tremendous potential to support the EU’s leading role in global health, notably through the implementation of the EU Global Health Strategy. Through preparedness, stockpiling, and partnerships, HERA strengthens the EU’s ability to respond to international health threats while promoting resilience, equity, and global cooperation.
We aim to provide an independent observation of HERA’s global health actions since its establishment. The actions are categorised by six main areas
Threat assessment and intelligence gathering
Research and development
Local production capacity
Donation and contribution of resources
Events and collaboration agreements
Global health instrument
HERA's budget for its international activities
HERA’s budget for its international activities
Share of international activities in HERA's budget over year
The graph includes only HERA’s budget for international activities under Task 6 (International Dimension) of its annual work plans for 2022 to 2025. It excludes the budget for global health-related activities under Task 1 (Threat Assessments and Intelligence Gathering) and Task 2 (Research and Development of MCMs) because their annual values were unavailable.
Source: HERA’s work plans for 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025; unit: EUR million.
Six areas of HERA’s global health actions
Six areas of HERA's global
health actions
Threat assessment and intelligence gathering
HERA collaborates globally to track pathogens, prioritizes medical countermeasures for key threats like pandemics and AMR while working to advance innovative diagnostics and platforms for rapid response.
HERA's funding for intelligence gathering and surveillance capacity from 2022-2024
Global level initiatives
Between 2022-2025. Sum of HERA's funding in 2025 for supporting WHO-Hub activities in pandemic and epidemic intelligence, notably to support better digital and collaborative tools for early detection and analysis of emerging threats; and for supporting activities related to the global and EU wastewater sentinel system, such as cooperating with the joint action on wastewater surveillance EU-WISH and the global consortium for wastewater and environmental surveillance for public health (‘GLOWACON’).
LMIC-focused initiatives
Between 2022-2025. Sum of HERA’s funding for the five initiatives: Joint funding for Africa CDC’s Pathogen Genomic Initiative 2.0, Collaboration with the WHO Regional Office for Africa (AFRO) to address the threat of emerging infections on the African continent, Support the establishment of a new WHO hub in Africa, Joint funding for the creation and operation of an independent panel through the Quadripartite cooperation on AMR.
Research and development
Through investment, HERA supports diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics, and PPE, working towards ensuring long-term preparedness and global health security.
HERA's funding for R&D in LMICs with epidemic and pandemic potential from 2022-2024
Sum of HERA’s financial contribution to international/global actions on R&D of MCMs relevant for LMICs, including CEPI, EDCTP, IHI, WHO initiatives on AMR and GloPID-R
Local production capacity
Role of HERA: technical and scientific expertise and advice for DG INTPA to identify and prioritise investment opportunities and projects under TEI MAV+
+95
6HERA’s role: technical and scientific expertise and advice for DG INTPA to identify and prioritise investment opportunities and projects under TEI MAV+
Donation and contribution of resources
This includes vaccines, diagnostics, and other resources to LMICs in response to emergencies including COVID-19 and Mpox
EU's Contribution to the Pandemic Fund
HERA’s role: Advice for the Euopean Commission in the design of calls for funding proposals and other strategic documents
EU’s Vaccine donation
HERA’s role: support for the EU and its Member States in donating vaccines
Events and collaboration agreements
HERA also participates and contributes to global events focused on global health security.
HERA participated in 11 events and missions focusing on public health security in LMICS
HERA signed 2 cumulative agreements with counterpart authorities in LMICs
HERA signed 4 agreements with international/multilateral organisations
